{"id":1196,"date":"2010-10-08T13:04:11","date_gmt":"2010-10-08T12:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1196"},"modified":"2010-10-14T10:30:53","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T09:30:53","slug":"the-sentimental-education-of-latin-american-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1196","title":{"rendered":"The Sentimental Education of Latin American Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature<\/strong>. To be honest, I\u2019d half assumed he\u2019d already won it years ago, so \u00a0major a figure has he been for so long.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry not to have been in Peru for this as sure that while he remains a controversial figure there \u2013 more for his exile in Europe than for his political views \u2013 they would be celebrating.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I remember being in a small town in Ecuador in 1982 when Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez won his Nobel (he has apparently just twittered Llosa to say that they are \u2018now even\u2019).\u00a0 Although it was only eleven in the morning, the bar filled up with excited revellers ordering brandies; he might have been Colombian, but the town was treating M\u00e1rquez as if he were a local boy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was writing of their world, with its perpetual llovizna<\/em>, that wonderful word for a soft drizzle of rain playing over the dampness of the platanales, <\/em>the banana-plantations, while the oceano n\u00edtido<\/em>, the bright ocean, stood off in the distance. The predominant mood in his books was one of nostalgia, \u2018tratando de recomponer con tantas astillas dispersas el espejo roto de la memoria<\/em>, trying to reconstitute so many scattered shards of the broken mirror of the memory,\u2019 a nostalgia weighed down with decay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Llosa plays a different game.\u00a0 His books are often at the sharp end \u2013 the brutality of life in Death in the Andes<\/em>, or under the dictator Trujillo (in one of his finest late books, The Feast of the Goat<\/em>) \u2013 laced with surreal or erotic moments.\u00a0 With M\u00e1rquez and other South American contemporaries, he shares a fascination with the brothel as a sentimental education.\u00a0 In his memoirs, A Fish in the Water<\/em>, \u00a0he writes that \u2018my generation lived the swansong of the brothel\u2019, a place where one could live \u2018a life apart\u2019, and \u00a0laments \u2018the banalisation of sex\u2019 that accompanied its disappearance as changing social mores allowed for sex outside marriage.\u00a0 He wrote about the one he frequented near Castilla in a novel that like much of his early work was autobiographical, The Green House<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rquez too has written a great deal about brothels \u2013 Love in the Time of Cholera <\/em>is full of them, for instance \u2013 but it was his last novella that really upset critics, Memories of My Melancholy Whores<\/em>, in which a man in his nineties sleeps with an underage girl, an uncomfortable and problematic book that showed that whatever else he was doing, M\u00e1rquez was not ageing gracefully.\u00a0 One wonders if the situations had been reversed, and it was Llosa who won it 30 years ago and M\u00e1rquez in contention now, how comfortable the Swedish judges would have been with that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

See my appreciation of M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Love in the Time of Cholera<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong>\u00a0 in a later interview<\/a>, Vargas Llosa described how he had been rung with news of the Nobel at 5 in the morning when he usually rises (one reason perhaps for his prodigious output);\u00a0 he had been reading Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo<\/em>, which he commended as ‘mystical, fantastical but also profoundly realistic’;\u00a0 they seem to me to be\u00a0 the qualities which distinguish his own work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. To be honest, I\u2019d half assumed he\u2019d already won it years ago, so \u00a0major a figure has he been for so long.\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry not to have been in Peru for this as sure that while he remains a controversial figure there \u2013 more for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,7],"tags":[71,70],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-peru","tag-gabriel-garcia-marquez","tag-mario-vargas-llosa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}